Icreon Tech Moves Offshore From India, Onshore to America

Forbes Asia
I cover tech and startups that work between the U.S. and China

Like many Indian IT consultancies in the early 2000’s, Icreon Tech relied heavily on selling highly skilled, English-speaking engineering talent to the West at a cheap rate. According to the Economist, in 2008, India claimed 65% of all offshored IT work.

But as the gap in pay between developing and developed countries continues to narrow, many Indian offshoring companies have been forced to rethink their arbitrage advantage.

Founded in 2000 by Himanshu Sareen out of a house in New Dehli, Icreon Tech focused on web development, user interface and experience work for many well funded start-ups during the tech boom. Business was good - they even became the national partner for National Geographic across three countries, and remain as a client today.

But when the financial markets crashed in 2008, the market was awash with thousands of Indian offshoring companies, making them commoditized and harder to compete.

Icreon Tech New York Team

So in 2010 Sareen made a big bet and hit the restart button on Icreon Tech. He embarked on a plan to transform the business from a traditional outsourcing company selling cheaper labor, to a New York based company that would compete on skill and quality.

Soon after setting up in New York, all the lessons learnt and track record that was developed in India, made the transition unexpectedly smooth. “We got a lot of business by being able to define core business problems,” said Sareen.

But the shift geographically required a shift in thinking. Sareen shared that when working from India, clients had to be extremely obvious because Indian workers take instructions very literally. However, when working from the U.S., the company had to become much more perceptive to client needs and ask and answer questions, even the client didn’t know.

Under the new operating model, it isn’t so much the engineering skill that Icreon Tech delivers, but more so their ability to solve business problems in a technical way. The timing of Icreon’s move aligned with the changing views towards offshoring. Especially for teams that want to scale, it’s easier to do it from home soil rather than go offshore to find talent.

By moving up the value chain, Icreon Tech has achieved great success. The company now has clients in over 100 countries including
Fox,
PepsiCo,
Nokia Siemens and Major League Baseball. They have created more than 50 mobile apps and generated more than a $1 million in daily sales for customers. Revenue is about to pass $25 Million.

The company has 35 staff working in the New York office; around 20 staff in London after acquiring Open Water Interactive and still maintain 400 developers in India.

The value of Icreon’s work is also reflected in its fees. It doesn’t price low anymore, but on equal footing with some of the high-end players in America. The company even won the bid for the large Japanese bathroom products company, TOTO against Sapient Nitro, a more established agency.

No longer seen as a cost center anymore, Icreon is working on things that matter. Some large enterprise projects are worth seven figures. There has been a strong demand for cloud based strategies, big data, mobile and more software integrated with hardware projects like home automation and wearable’s.

One of the more challenging and exciting projects was to build the mobile technology to support an Uber-like service for Equador. Traditionally, Equadorian taxis don’t use meters and the internet connection can only run on 2G networks, not 3G. By sending people to Equador to understand the context and constraints, Icreon managed to successfully deploy a taxi-meter on Android.

For Sareen, he’s come a long way from a house in New Dehli to an office in New York, working with some of the world’s largest brands. As he manages a global company, Sareen still finds gratification in seeing his company’s work in the wild and using cutting edge technology.

Originally from Australia, I spent 4 years in Beijing where I was a co-founding member and English Editor of TechNode, one of Asia’s leading independent tech media that now manages TechCrunch China. I covered stories on local entrepreneurs, start-ups and tech trends that sh...